Poetry Quote by Ocean Vuong — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“But why can't the language for creativity be the language of regeneration? You killed that poem, we say. You're a killer. You came into that novel guns blazing. I am hammering this paragraph, I am banging them out, we say. I owned that workshop. I shut it down. I crushed them. We smashed the competition. I'm wrestling with the muse. The state, where people live, is a battleground state. The audience a target audience. "Good for you, man" a man once said to me at a party, "you're making a killing with poetry. You're knockin' em dead.”

“A page, turning, is a wing lifted with no twin, and therefore no flight. And yet we are moved.”

“God must be a season, grandma said, looking out at the blizzard drowning”

“Some nights you are the lighthouse / some nights the sea / what this means is that I don't know / desire other than the need / to be shattered & rebuilt / the mind forgetting / the body's crime of living”

“I’ll tell you how we’re wrong enough to be forgiven. How one night, after backhanding mother, then taking a chain saw to the kitchen table, my father went to kneel in the bathroom until we heard his muffled cries through the walls. & so I learned—that a man in climax was the closest thing”

“Danse Russe”

“The magic fades too fast”

“The moon shines in my body, but my blind eyes cannot see it:”

“لا تملَّ أو تغضبْ أو تكتئب”

“Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.”

“Always be a poet, even in prose.”